What soapy thing have you done today?

[sarahmarah]

is that all the same soap? The colours are very different but the design is the same. Either way I love the design.

Thank you. It’s all the same soap. I don’t get a lot of natural light in my kitchen so I took a pic outside too.

 

[Jersey Girl]

Made yet another confetti soap! Apple Mango Tango Goat Milk Soap has my whole house smelling heavenly!

 

[Elizevt]

I just Finnished making my very first soap.
I was planning to do it last night, but I had some analysis paralysis.

I got all my ingredients and weighed it out. One problem I had was with the scale. It's a plastic food scale and I just noticed today that it only weighs in 5gram increments.

But I just adjusted my lye Calc measurements to give me whole numbers for my water and lye measurements. And then weighed my oils out as best I could. Erring on the side of, rather a drop or two to much, than to little.

My lye was room temperature and my oils were at 40 degrees Celsius when I mixed them.
I was making a soap with powdered lavender and oats and I originally wanted to split the batch and color it half with white kaolin clay and half with pink clay. But before I even added any clays or oats etc it had already reached a thick ploppy pudding like trace.
I stressed a bit that it was going to get to thick. But in hindsight, it really wasn't that bad.

Being my first soap I didn't want to mess it up, so I didn't do a 2 color pink/white blend, I just did 1 color. I added the pink clay and my lavender and oats and lavender essential oil. Mixed it all in and put it in my mold.

I'll do 2 colors for my next soap..

I decorated it with a few corn flowers and it is on the shelf setting up now.

Touch wood it comes out fine.

I'll update tomorrow when I unmold and cut.

 

[linne1gi]

I just Finnished making my very first soap.
I was planning to do it last night, but I had some analysis paralysis.

I got all my ingredients and weighed it out. One problem I had was with the scale. It's a plastic food scale and I just noticed today that it only weighs in 5gram increments.

But I just adjusted my lye Calc measurements to give me whole numbers for my water and lye measurements. And then weighed my oils out as best I could. Erring on the side of, rather a drop or two to much, than to little.

My lye was room temperature and my oils were at 40 degrees Celsius when I mixed them.
I was making a soap with powdered lavender and oats and I originally wanted to split the batch and color it half with white kaolin clay and half with pink clay. But before I even added any clays or oats etc it had already reached a thick ploppy pudding like trace.
I stressed a bit that it was going to get to thick. But in hindsight, it really wasn't that bad.

Being my first soap I didn't want to mess it up, so I didn't do a 2 color pink/white blend, I just did 1 color. I added the pink clay and my lavender and oats and lavender essential oil. Mixed it all in and put it in my mold.

I'll do 2 colors for my next soap..

I decorated it with a few corn flowers and it is on the shelf setting up now.

Touch wood it comes out fine.

I'll update tomorrow when I unmold and cut.

View attachment 47748

It's always safer to weigh in grams than ounces. 28 grams equals one ounce. So if you are off by a gram it's not big deal, but if you are off by an ounce, that's a problem. I like to round down with lye and round up with oils - that gives you a cushion. For example if you need 44.4 grams of lye - I would use 44 grams. If you need 87.8 grams of olive oil round up to 88. If you can only weight by 5 gram increments, I would use 45 grams of lye and 90 grams of oils. Hope this makes sense.

 

[Bari b]

I unmolded my batch of Zany's No Slime Castile this morning - just after about 14 hours. I probably could have waited another few hours, but it came out all right, only a little soft at the edges. Will cut it tomorrow morning. Looking good so far! Thanks for the recipe, @Zany_in_CO !

 

[Jillyb]

Made yet another confetti soap! Apple Mango Tango Goat Milk Soap has my whole house smelling heavenly!

Nice, lovin that colour choice.

I'm a closet watcher! But, I'm daring to show everyone a picture of my Raspberry High Top Goat Milk soap. I just started piping soap so it's not perfect! Made this on July 9th. Going unmold later today and cut. I'm praying my colors haven't morphed and the swirl came out!

The top looks great.. excited to see your cut

 

[Devivi]

I am about to make my second batch of cp soap! 50% olive 30% coconut and 20% avocado
Still unsure of what properties i like best in my soap so playing around with small batches

 

[Elizevt]

Very Excited!!!
I just cut my very first batch of soap I made yesterday. Powdered Lavender and colloidal oatmeal. I finely ground my lavender so that it doesnt look like mouse poops. The lavender powder becomes VERY fragrant when it's ground up.
Looks and smells amazing.

I'm not sure how soap should feel when it comes out of the mould so today's soap is my first baseline reference.
It feels a bit like beeswax. But it holds its shape well.

The soap does still give a zap. I accidentally touched the tip of my tongue after cutting my soap and got a good zap. Its exactly like a battery zap to the tongue, you can't miss it.
I'll test it again for zappiness over the next few days to see at what point it disappears.

I've laid my little soapies out under a net to cure.

Waiting is by far the hardest part of making soap. I can't wait to try my soaps out.

 

[TashaBird]

I had soap making dreams last night. Planning to try my first actual layer soap. Wanting straight stripes. Going to make three separate small batches and let each one set a little. I’m pretty excited about it!

 

[jcandleattic]

Finally got around to inventorying all my scents. Well, most of them. I did't count the little 1 oz sample size and I didn't inventory any of my EO's (only a handful of those)
So without counting any duplicates, the 1 oz sample size (probably about 75+ of those) or the EO's, I stand at 292 unique FO's in various sizes. I actually thought I had much more than that, but that's plenty!! LOL

 

[SPowers]

I made a batch yesterday with my tried and true lard recipe. I wanted to try a hanger swirl and I used pink clay and green barleygrass powder for colour. For fragrance, I used Ylang Ylang and 10x orange (and a small amt of something else that I can't remember atm). Everything was fine til I added the fragrance. I thought it might be the orange - doesn't anyone know if that accelerated? I'd never used Ylang Ylang before so maybe it's that - that had the highest % of the blend. So I ended up glopping the white in the bottom then glopped the pink and green along each side. I added a very think silver pencil line then repeated the layers. It's very rustic - the top might poke your eye out! But it smells very nice.

 

[MGM]

A friend of mine in another city makes lovely masks (from what I've seen on Facebook) so I offered her some soap in exchange for masks for my family. She messaged to say that she put the 4 masks in the mail today, so I had to pack up the soap. Canada Post is funny about parcel rates, and sending 3 soaps would only be a few dollars less than sending 43, so here we are.....

 

[GemstonePony]

Today was my 2nd attempt making MWHP mini bars for my sensitive oily/combination face. Yesterday I burned the oils, miscalculated the honey by a long shot, and wound up with oozey, oddly zappy soap. For 100g of oil, I decided to just recalculate the recipe a smidge and start over.
Coconut oil, cocoa butter, and castor oil were mixed with the lye (mixture) until thickened, then I added avocado oil and Shea butter, SF 7.
AVJ 100% liquid, additives of Citric Acid, honey, charcoal, and fine (think espresso) coffee grounds.
They look and smell like I've saponified bulletproof coffee. I've intentionally partially filled a few of the molds for test scraps.
I also tried a tiny scrap from my first soap batch I made two weeks ago just to see how it was doing, and was delighted it lathered up in a few seconds and left a nice feeling on my hands. I'm even more impatient now for the bars to cure. Also, I was surprised the fragrance stayed with me- I hadn't realized that was possible with soap. I have significantly more enthusiasm about FOs now- before I thought they were just what you might maybe notice while handling the soap.

 

[Zany_in_CO]

...sending 3 soaps would only be a few dollars less than sending 43, so here we are.....

Your friend is going to be blown away when she sees all those soaps! So cool! It's like Christmas in July!

BTW, have you ever used the Flat Rate ($8.40) Priority padded envelopes for Domestic and International mail? They hold about 9 soaps and for up to 70 ounces. I'm waiting to send to a friend in Spain but that country isn't accepting mail from outside the country yet. I'll be curious to hear how long it takes for your package to get into Canada. They're fairly paranoid about shipments from the USA up there IME.

 

[jcandleattic]

@Zany_in_CO - MGM is in Canada already, so she would be shipping domestically.

 

[Zany_in_CO]

@Zany_in_CO - MGM is in Canada already, so she would be shipping domestically.

ACK! Do you know what?! In my addle-pated head I thought I was responding to you, Janel. Weird.
Sorry, MGM. You'll understand crazy faux pas like that when you get to be my age.

 

[MGM]

lol no worries @Zany_in_CO. I'm always drooling at the tiny little stamps on packages my MIL or American friends send...even *to* Canada, it's always so cheap!
Funniest part is that the friend doesn't even live that far away....well, it's probably an hour and a half drive now, but we used to be able to get to her place in the Gay Ghetto in 55 min on a Sunday morning. (Trying to give @SPowers more clues about where I am )

 

[TashaBird]

A friend of mine in another city makes lovely masks (from what I've seen on Facebook) so I offered her some soap in exchange for masks for my family. She messaged to say that she put the 4 masks in the mail today, so I had to pack up the soap. Canada Post is funny about parcel rates, and sending 3 soaps would only be a few dollars less than sending 43, so here we are.....

Those are really beautiful soaps!

 

[peachymoon]

I thought of this thread yesterday. I'm a new soaper, so I've been reading/doing research during the week, and have been "practicing" with a small batch every weekend for the last month. This weekend was the first week I didn't soap, but I realized I DID do a soapy thing--I set up and organized the shelf I bought to store my supplies/air out my soaps. It's exciting to see everything on display, it feels more official somehow.

 

[TashaBird]

I feel like I’ve been waiting for this soap forever! It is so simplistic and classic looking, and I don’t usually do pink. I formulated it to be extra moisturizing, so I’m calling it lotion soap. And surprisingly the rose geranium essential oil survived the cure very nicely! It’s rose geranium and orange EO. This one is going to be a keeper! I think I’ll make another batch this week.

I attempted a gradient layer soap from yellow to pink to red using clay. It’s on the heating pad now. A fun low stress experiment. I’m curious to see how it turns out tomorrow!